What's a iPhone? A tiny PC, that's what. And a PC is a giant iPhone. The story here is that lots of people want to carry a small smart screen around with them, like we didn't know that. It's a good place for little apps, messaging, and small emails -- and making phone calls.
But sometimes you want a 20 inch screen - or two of them. How much coding is done on the iPhone? How much graphics editing? Where would you want to write your thesis or read Wikipedia? Reading War and Peace on my smartphone is a real chore, but it fits nicely on the Kindle.
The story is that all the computer ecological niches are being filled: desktop, laptop, small laptop (iPad), and hand-held. Not to mention "real" computers in datacenters. An investor wants to know who's going to make the big profits, but I want one of each, please.
Newsflash: Linux is not going to overtake Windows or MacOS on the desktop. Who ever thought they would?
Be happy with what we have: A vibrant niche of the computing world, where geeks hang out and where lots of cool experimentation and collaboration happens. And where a lot of folks learn skills that they can use on the dark side if they need to earn a living. (And where corporate folks invest lots of $$ to get cost-effective server and embedded solutions.)
If Linux had conquered the desktop, most of us would have to move on to some other GeekOS.
It's about science - mapping radio galaxies at high resolution at VHF frequencies. Really hard to do that amidst all the RF on those freqs.
SETI is nice, but it's nice to get real results, too. Not to mention pretty pictures.
Tarnish is not the right word. Heathkit had its beginnings in aviation and developed into electronics kits after WW II. Electronics equipment was generally assembled by hand until the late 60's or so, and there were substantial savings to the customer if he/she was willing to assemble it him/herself. Then, printed circuit techniques and especially integrated circuits and automatic (and off-shore) assembly reduced the labor cost dramatically. It was technically harder to build competitive gear at home, and the labor savings are now probably negative. Kit building is much less interesting now, except for specialized market niches.
So the Heath company was bought by Zenith and eventually left the general consumer electronics business entirely. (Zenith used to be a famous brand, by the way. It could have been on the list.) A company needs to seek the most profitable markets. It's sad, but it's not a moral decision. Change is not "tarnish".
...if somebody studies astronomy and will have to work with old legacy Forth code, he should better be taught to program in Forth at university...
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
Exactly. One of the most fundamental concepts is how a computer works -- what is storage, what are the data types and fundamental operators, etc. There is no substitute for learning an actual machine language -- using an assembler, if that helps;-) Back in the day, it was possible to test out of a foreign language requirement in grad school if you could show competence in assembler. Seemed like a deal to me!
Then you need to learn one each of a classical procedural language (Fortran), a functional language (Mathematica?), an OO language (Python), and then a language with pointers (C) to see how to screw up royally.
The reason organizations don't "give back" their IP assignments is that there is not much incentive to do so. Why not a market based solution?
One example: I am puzzled that radio amateurs (AMPRNET) own 44.00.00.00/8 and do not make significant use of it. As a ham myself, I'd be happy to convert that to, say, $10M for the betterment of the hobby.
I use pssh on my Treo 650 -- Sprint issue from the dark ages, but still going strong. I interpret the "security" warnings partly as CYA on the provider's part. I presume it means that pssh uses trivial-ish keys and random numbers which would make it "easy" to break the encryption -- on sessions involving your PDA. It shouldn't otherwise compromise your server's integrity, which is much more important (to me). I'm no security expert, so I'd like someone to confirm all this!
Why hasn't someone come forward with a "real" ssh client, for which I'd be happy to pay $20?
BTW, you get extra security when using pssh in the 80 column mode on the '650. No fear that anyone is reading over your shoulder.
If you want something more on the practical side, emphasizing (but not limited to) radio techniques, you could look at
The ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications.
It's a great reference book.
Power usage = Power dissipated in heat. It's virtually the same thing. Temperature rise is proportional to power dissipation divided by thermal conductivity to the outside world (your lap or room air).
The RiData unit is specified at about 2.1 Watts, read or write. (Standby power might be much less, but they don't give a number.) The 200 GB Seagate drive is spec'd at 2.1 W during seek and under 1 W in idle/standby. So the power saving on the RiData active SSD is not much.
The obvious solution. Banks reload their ATM software for voting on election day. The candidates can buy your votes all the more easily -- cash comes out of the slot.
While the NSF may want credit, they are mainly a funding organization without any actual research staff. The work was done at the Center of Integrated Nanomechanical Systems, which is hosted by UC Berkeley. The work was done by people at UCB and LBNL.
A great job of PR! Hopefully, there is really something to it. At the moment, it seems that they have set up a million dollars of high vacuum cryo equipment (I'm guessing) and transmitted audio from one side of the room to the other. You can "rent" web access to their paper for two days for $25 from the ACS. So much for taxpayer-funded open source literature...
The news here is using the Internet for a real-time transmission of a substantial bandwidth of RF to a central correlation receiver. Non-real-time "whole earth telescopes" have been running since the 1970s. It's called
Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
I'm curious if the Milky Way is a part of the alignment.
Yes, it is, more or less: (from the FA)
Elliptic Galaxy Axis 183±8 deg 41±8 deg
North Galactic Pole 192.9 deg 27.1 deg
1st no. is right ascension (longitude for stars), second is declination (latitude).
This is really an amazing result. The galaxies way over there on the "left" side of the Universe know what the galaxies on the "right" are doing! It's so amazing, it makes you wonder if it might be wrong. For example, it might really be a property of some more local grouping of galaxies. Don't take it at face value -- yet.
In fact what they do is compress the dynamic range of the audio, so the "apparent loudness" is increased. The peaks (which is how the FCC defines volume) are the same, but the RMS volume (essentially the average sound level and what our ear perceives as volume) is increased. Think about it, a CD is 16 bit, so the max volume is obviously 2^16=65536 for any particular data sample. So, they can't make the volume 2^17. What they can do, however, is compress the dynamic range, so instead of the average volume level to be at 4096, say, it is now 16483.
What do you think "volume" is? It's a perception of loudness, which is only roughly related to anything you can measure numerically. A 16-bit data sample on a CD tells you the sampled electrical voltage, which is definitely not loudness. The square of voltage is power, which is getting closer. So the 32,768 to 1 range of voltages (plus and minus) gives you a range of 1,073,741,824 to 1 in power, or as these things are normally measured, about 90 dB dynamic range. Perceived audio "loudness" is roughly logarithmic; that's why the dB number is useful.
A 1 dB change (26% in power ratio) is barely detectable. The threshold of pain is up to 120 dB higher than the minimum detectable sound level. So even an uncompressed CD does not have enough dynamic range to capture what you might hear at a rock concert. (Just before you go deaf.)
I wouldn't jump that way until I had a good ASCII - EBCDIC translation table. Not to mention Unicode.
We once used card punches in binary mode using a 'compress' utility. It mostly worked, but it was pretty frightening to punch a file of all -1's - every possible hole punched on each card.
They may have good intentions, but how big is their legal staff? Small vendors are more vulnerable than the Verios of the world. But the Verios may cave faster, because they're run by businessmen.
I have been involved with administering amateur radio license exams since 1992 and have overseen two separate exam teams since 1999. So, I have seen us transition from a rather complicated licensing structure to one that is a bit more sane.
I hear comments that amateur radio is being "dumbed down" to match the output of the government schools. The truth be told, I have witnessed people from many walks of life be thoroughly confused by the old licensing structure. So, there it little doubt in my mind that changes needed to be made. Some questions come to mind about ham radio licensing -
Why do we have licensing for ham radio? We license ham operators and auto drivers, but not CB/FMRS or Internet users. What's up with that? The idea is that if you're going to "drive" a kilowatt radio transmitter with widely variable frequency and potentially large antenna systems and worldwide propagation, you need to be qualified - to understand the damage you can do to other users and to the public if you don't observe minimum standards, etc. The risks involved with Citizens Band or the Internet are judged to be minor. (debatable, though!)
Historically (like > 40 years ago), it really did take quite a lot of work and study to get yourself on the air, and the license exams were only part of it.
Morse Code? Historically (again > 30 or 40 years ago), Morse Code (aka CW = continuous wave) was the only practical way for new hams to get on the air. If you are building your own equipment, this is still true! Minimum knowledge of Morse was a practical necessity, and it demonstrated earnestness. Exactly why it became part of the international convention (1934), I can't tell you.
Why do we have a volunteer examiner system? Apparently the government, in its wisdom, still thinks licensing is necessary (and a treaty obligation under 30 MHz, perhaps), but it is not willing to allocate the resources to manage the examination program. The VEC exams seem to be a compromise -- not as "serious" as the old FCC administered exams (let me tell you!), but cheap and still a meaningful hurdle to pass.
Are the license requirements relevant? This is the real question. In olden days, you had to be able to draw or recognize a misdrawn circuit diagram of a Hartley or Colpitts oscillator and know a fair amount of other practical electronics. You had to send and receive Morse at 5, 13, or 20 wpm, depending on license class. Today, other skills are more relevant - digital modulation and signal processing, computer interfacing, Internet services. Few people build their own equipment. The role of Morse/CW is much less central to ham radio, though still very popular for some of us. Reluctantly, I'd say it should have been eliminated years ago as a license requirement. Some of us will always work CW, just as some homebrew their gear and some do their own DSP coding. But it won't be a barrier for everyone else.
Slashdot Mirror
...If you want to be able to write fast software, I suggest you read Ulrich Drepper's What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory. It's not that long, and very informative.
It's 114 pages of not that long, but who's counting?
Funny, my home NATed systems seem to work with VPNs, Skype, and all that. What's the problem again? I suppose it's something to do with the routers?
What's a iPhone? A tiny PC, that's what. And a PC is a giant iPhone. The story here is that lots of people want to carry a small smart screen around with them, like we didn't know that. It's a good place for little apps, messaging, and small emails -- and making phone calls.
But sometimes you want a 20 inch screen - or two of them. How much coding is done on the iPhone? How much graphics editing? Where would you want to write your thesis or read Wikipedia? Reading War and Peace on my smartphone is a real chore, but it fits nicely on the Kindle.
The story is that all the computer ecological niches are being filled: desktop, laptop, small laptop (iPad), and hand-held. Not to mention "real" computers in datacenters. An investor wants to know who's going to make the big profits, but I want one of each, please.
Let 1,000 flowers bloom, said Mr. Mao.
If Linux had conquered the desktop, most of us would have to move on to some other GeekOS.
It's about science - mapping radio galaxies at high resolution at VHF frequencies. Really hard to do that amidst all the RF on those freqs. SETI is nice, but it's nice to get real results, too. Not to mention pretty pictures.
Tarnish is not the right word. Heathkit had its beginnings in aviation and developed into electronics kits after WW II. Electronics equipment was generally assembled by hand until the late 60's or so, and there were substantial savings to the customer if he/she was willing to assemble it him/herself. Then, printed circuit techniques and especially integrated circuits and automatic (and off-shore) assembly reduced the labor cost dramatically. It was technically harder to build competitive gear at home, and the labor savings are now probably negative. Kit building is much less interesting now, except for specialized market niches.
So the Heath company was bought by Zenith and eventually left the general consumer electronics business entirely. (Zenith used to be a famous brand, by the way. It could have been on the list.) A company needs to seek the most profitable markets. It's sad, but it's not a moral decision. Change is not "tarnish".
True geeks wear white lab coats. That's what I'd want!
Think Beaker.
This is exactly the wrong reason to teach any programming language. You teach a language to teach programming concepts and methodologies, and so you use languages that emphasize the concepts you want to teach.
Exactly. One of the most fundamental concepts is how a computer works -- what is storage, what are the data types and fundamental operators, etc. There is no substitute for learning an actual machine language -- using an assembler, if that helps ;-) Back in the day, it was possible to test out of a foreign language requirement in grad school if you could show competence in assembler. Seemed like a deal to me!
Then you need to learn one each of a classical procedural language (Fortran), a functional language (Mathematica?), an OO language (Python), and then a language with pointers (C) to see how to screw up royally.
Why is this newsworthy? There was a bug (a bug!) in the LHC software? The bug was found by an _undergraduate_? An undergraduate _girl_?
No - an undergraduate girl from _Princeton_!
-as seen from Yale, anyway.
The reason organizations don't "give back" their IP assignments is that there is not much incentive to do so. Why not a market based solution?
One example: I am puzzled that radio amateurs (AMPRNET) own 44.00.00.00/8 and do not make significant use of it. As a ham myself, I'd be happy to convert that to, say, $10M for the betterment of the hobby.
Might as well have everyone strip down and wear hospital gowns on the plane. Pre-flight enema, optional.
I use pssh on my Treo 650 -- Sprint issue from the dark ages, but still going strong. I interpret the "security" warnings partly as CYA on the provider's part. I presume it means that pssh uses trivial-ish keys and random numbers which would make it "easy" to break the encryption -- on sessions involving your PDA. It shouldn't otherwise compromise your server's integrity, which is much more important (to me). I'm no security expert, so I'd like someone to confirm all this!
Why hasn't someone come forward with a "real" ssh client, for which I'd be happy to pay $20?
BTW, you get extra security when using pssh in the 80 column mode on the '650. No fear that anyone is reading over your shoulder.
If you want something more on the practical side, emphasizing (but not limited to) radio techniques, you could look at The ARRL Handbook for Radio Communications. It's a great reference book.
Power usage = Power dissipated in heat. It's virtually the same thing. Temperature rise is proportional to power dissipation divided by thermal conductivity to the outside world (your lap or room air).
The RiData unit is specified at about 2.1 Watts, read or write. (Standby power might be much less, but they don't give a number.) The 200 GB Seagate drive is spec'd at 2.1 W during seek and under 1 W in idle/standby. So the power saving on the RiData active SSD is not much.
The obvious solution. Banks reload their ATM software for voting on election day. The candidates can buy your votes all the more easily -- cash comes out of the slot.
Ask him if he knows what BALR does. What's an 80A abend? (a real coder!)
If he's a science guy of a certain age, he might be happier with MOV @(R5)+,R2 (PDP-11)
If he does i386 assembler, I'd also be impressed, but vanilla "assembler" doesn't cut it.
A great job of PR! Hopefully, there is really something to it. At the moment, it seems that they have set up a million dollars of high vacuum cryo equipment (I'm guessing) and transmitted audio from one side of the room to the other. You can "rent" web access to their paper for two days for $25 from the ACS. So much for taxpayer-funded open source literature...
The news here is using the Internet for a real-time transmission of a substantial bandwidth of RF to a central correlation receiver. Non-real-time "whole earth telescopes" have been running since the 1970s. It's called Very Long Baseline Interferometry.
Elliptic Galaxy Axis 183±8 deg 41±8 deg
North Galactic Pole 192.9 deg 27.1 deg
1st no. is right ascension (longitude for stars), second is declination (latitude).
This is really an amazing result. The galaxies way over there on the "left" side of the Universe know what the galaxies on the "right" are doing! It's so amazing, it makes you wonder if it might be wrong. For example, it might really be a property of some more local grouping of galaxies. Don't take it at face value -- yet.
What do you think "volume" is? It's a perception of loudness, which is only roughly related to anything you can measure numerically. A 16-bit data sample on a CD tells you the sampled electrical voltage, which is definitely not loudness. The square of voltage is power, which is getting closer. So the 32,768 to 1 range of voltages (plus and minus) gives you a range of 1,073,741,824 to 1 in power, or as these things are normally measured, about 90 dB dynamic range. Perceived audio "loudness" is roughly logarithmic; that's why the dB number is useful.
A 1 dB change (26% in power ratio) is barely detectable. The threshold of pain is up to 120 dB higher than the minimum detectable sound level. So even an uncompressed CD does not have enough dynamic range to capture what you might hear at a rock concert. (Just before you go deaf.)
I wouldn't jump that way until I had a good ASCII - EBCDIC translation table. Not to mention Unicode.
We once used card punches in binary mode using a 'compress' utility. It mostly worked, but it was pretty frightening to punch a file of all -1's - every possible hole punched on each card.
Monkeys are the root of all evals?
They may have good intentions, but how big is their legal staff? Small vendors are more vulnerable than the Verios of the world. But the Verios may cave faster, because they're run by businessmen.
Worse than that: Metric is a French plot.
I hear comments that amateur radio is being "dumbed down" to match the output of the government schools. The truth be told, I have witnessed people from many walks of life be thoroughly confused by the old licensing structure. So, there it little doubt in my mind that changes needed to be made. Some questions come to mind about ham radio licensing - Why do we have licensing for ham radio? We license ham operators and auto drivers, but not CB/FMRS or Internet users. What's up with that? The idea is that if you're going to "drive" a kilowatt radio transmitter with widely variable frequency and potentially large antenna systems and worldwide propagation, you need to be qualified - to understand the damage you can do to other users and to the public if you don't observe minimum standards, etc. The risks involved with Citizens Band or the Internet are judged to be minor. (debatable, though!)
Historically (like > 40 years ago), it really did take quite a lot of work and study to get yourself on the air, and the license exams were only part of it.
Morse Code? Historically (again > 30 or 40 years ago), Morse Code (aka CW = continuous wave) was the only practical way for new hams to get on the air. If you are building your own equipment, this is still true! Minimum knowledge of Morse was a practical necessity, and it demonstrated earnestness. Exactly why it became part of the international convention (1934), I can't tell you. Why do we have a volunteer examiner system? Apparently the government, in its wisdom, still thinks licensing is necessary (and a treaty obligation under 30 MHz, perhaps), but it is not willing to allocate the resources to manage the examination program. The VEC exams seem to be a compromise -- not as "serious" as the old FCC administered exams (let me tell you!), but cheap and still a meaningful hurdle to pass. Are the license requirements relevant? This is the real question. In olden days, you had to be able to draw or recognize a misdrawn circuit diagram of a Hartley or Colpitts oscillator and know a fair amount of other practical electronics. You had to send and receive Morse at 5, 13, or 20 wpm, depending on license class. Today, other skills are more relevant - digital modulation and signal processing, computer interfacing, Internet services. Few people build their own equipment. The role of Morse/CW is much less central to ham radio, though still very popular for some of us. Reluctantly, I'd say it should have been eliminated years ago as a license requirement. Some of us will always work CW, just as some homebrew their gear and some do their own DSP coding. But it won't be a barrier for everyone else.73 de AA6E, "20 wpm Extra Class" ham